Dewey, Experiential Learning, and The Reddit Project

In 1938 John Dewey gave us Experience and Education, a book that offered both a critique of traditional and emerging progressive educational models, and an educational philosophy that attempted to put values like freedom, experience and individualization in a balanced and functional conversation with order,  facilitation, and long-term sustainability.

Seventy-five years later, the educational system still has yet to comprehensively catch up. Though there have been widespread steps away from what Dewey called the "old school" (Let's pause and give Dewey credit for coining the phrase more than half a century before it became a Millenial catch phrase), those steps have been far from a critical, mass re-thinking of institutionalized education.

The contextual scenario is now infinitely more complicated than it was in 1938, and not simply because of the swiftly shrinking, globalizing, hyperconnected nature of the world circa 2013, but because of changes in our concepts of diversity and equity, the broadening expanse of "disciplines", the impact of postmodernity on social, cultural, and even educational philosophy...

In short, I mean to say the world has evolved faster than our system of education.

You don't say?

Of course that disparity was, to an extent, inevitable. We're never going to stay ahead of change, but Dewey had some pretty radical things to say in 1938 that--though he has been distinguished and studied as the major voice in pedagogical theory over the course of the century--somehow missed being picked up in full by the educational bureaucracy and thus fell far short of their potential for revolutionizing academia any number of years before now.

Like in chapter one, when he points out that seeing the need for--and adopting--a new philosophy is not in and of itself the solution to the flaws in the old philosophy, nor is reacting in the violent and polarized opposite of a broken system necessarily any better than reiterating the broken system.

Or when he observed that, despite their intentions to educate a new generation in preparation for the future, present teaching methods actually treated contemporary knowledge as if it was this static, Truth-y thing that would never be altered by future discovery or cultural enlightenment, endowing us instead a mentally immobile generation with a massive distaste for learning.

I was fascinated when, in chapter five, Dewey reminded us that freedom is the means for learning, not the end. That teachers cannot know how best to cultivate learning for each student when the students have no freedom to express their individual differences, learning needs, and identities.

And again in chapter seven, though it seems so simple and obvious now, Dewey was the one to point out that no one can hope to learn a thing that does not conceptually begin, or have foundations, inside their realm of experience—that we cannot be expected to wrap our head around ideas that are entirely foreign—and that teachers must consciously select a stepping off point that is within the existing knowledge of the student and create learning as a series of gradual steps expanding outward from that point.  How neat was the idea that we could treat not all old experiences and memories as fixed, but as potential to be written in new language that opens up the floor to new knowledge in a way that is interesting and engaging to the learner?
So this spurred me to sit and think about my Reddit project and how it related to some of Dewey’s key propositions of experiential learning:

☐        The philosophy of experiential education begins with the assumption that we are naturally and socially inclined to learn from our experiences as our primary means of making sense of the world.

☐        It is not enough to merely foreground experience as the ideal learning opportunity, but quality experience that is both immediately interesting and contributive to long-term growth.

☐        The primary job of the educator is to use their expertise to create opportunities for students to have quality learning experiences, by implementing a structure that balances the hand of organization and guidance with students’ individual freedom to negotiate their own purpose and methods of learning.

☐        To accomplish this, an instructor must create a path of learning that begins within the learner’s realm of experience, accounts for the diverse environmental factors that each student brings to the table, and proceeds gradually, building on the foundations of prior experiences, as is the most reasonable expectation for progress.

My vision for the Reddit classroom project is this: Begin with a subreddit dedicated to the course, ideally creating a virtual space that promotes group identification, inclusivity, and entertaining discursive participation.

Divide the course itself into thematic units—UNT Comm classes have done a solid job of this already. For Intro to Communication it might look much the same: a foundations unit that highlights various overall communication models like social constructionism, followed by subsequent units that focus on particular perspectives: power structures in society, feminist criticism, communication as performance, etc. The objective is for the learners to, by the end of the term, have a broader and more critical understanding of the different ways communication can be approached and understood, and why it is useful to have that variety of models for understanding.

For each unit, create its own subreddit. Within these thematic forums, learners are encouraged to find texts from popular culture to analyze from the standpoint of the current unit, recall relevant examples from their own experiences, even share personal narratives and connect them to the concepts. 

√        The philosophy of experiential education begins with the assumption that we are naturally and socially inclined to learn from our experiences as our primary means of making sense of the world.

First principle met! And because the challenge is to use these past experience to develop their critical thinking skills for viewing, interpreting, and responding to their future encounters with the world… 

√        It is not enough to merely foreground experience as the ideal learning opportunity, but quality experience that is both immediately interesting and contributive to long-term growth.

Second principle: Check!

For me, the most important factor of this project is that learners are to use the comment system to extend the conversations into dialogues in a way that previous “blogging” learning tools have not been able to stimulate. I am opposed to setting the expectation for each student to reply to their peers in blocks governed by the minimum word count.

 I see Reddit as a solution for its ability to spark conversation, and even debate, in as many words as it naturally takes to keep the students participating in a back-and-forth, rather than submitting their 250-word peer responses and promptly removing themselves from conversation and severing any possibility for meaningful, extended discourse. It would be naïve to assume I could achieve this naturally. After all, most of the students are not likely to be familiar with Reddit and for those who are, well, even if they have some familiarity with the critical side of Reddit, most of their sense of its usefulness and entertainment value as a social media probably looks like 

Let’s be real for a moment. Reddit is the land of trolls. The land of clever one-liners. Puns, communal inside-jokes, cheap shots, and shock value are prioritized almost above all else. Though thoughtful conversation can be found there already, it’s not by any means the norm. In fact, it’s hidden amongst the countless threads that Dewey would describe as problematic (or “mis-educative”) experience for this purpose because back-grounding the thoughtful reflection for the humor-shot, while immediately entertaining, doesn’t do much for one’s potential for long-term growth. This is the problem that I face because I have decided to experiment with Reddit as my social-media learning tool of choice. 

This is where the role of the instructor, as course-builder and Dewey-ian hand of maturity, becomes necessary to consider. How am I going to control for the tendency (that Dewey claimed students had) towards immediate amusement over longer-term learning development, especially in this context where it seems to be such an apparent danger? 

I envision the first few days of class to be dedicated to setting up and strengthening the implemented structure: using icebreakers and activities to strengthen the sense of social connectedness amongst students, and then to have an orientation to Reddit that familiarizes students with the medium and also creates an opportunity for the class to build their own contract for learning and behavior expectations when using Reddit. 

The key is allowing the students agency to participate in creating their own mechanism of social control, but having enough—and only enough--of a hand in contributing to the process so as to build personal credibility and establish my role as a facilitator. This doesn’t mean giving students the ultimate freedom to set rules that don’t lead towards quality learning, but keeping in mind our ultimate purpose of  developing long-term experiential learning skills and designing expectations that are conducive to this, but customized to the desires of the class.

After the orientation period, my plan entails briefly previewing concepts before each unit opens up on Reddit, to kindle the spark of understanding enough that learners are sufficiently prepared to converse on the subject, and then synthesizing the conversations that students collaborated in on the Reddit subforums in a dedicated in-class follow-up which aims to reinforce explicit and critical connections of the concepts, experiences, and future implications, reserving enough time at the end of the follow-up discussion to preview and define the next concept and begin the cycle anew. 

√        The primary job of the educator is to use their expertise to create opportunities for students to have quality learning experiences, by implementing a structure that balances the hand of organization and guidance with students’ individual freedom to negotiate their own purpose and methods of learning.

Appropriate structuring that gives students agency… also check!

So overall my vision involves a preliminary discussion that helps to enhance students’ understood definition of a concept and provide them with a vocabulary to engage in critical discourse about the concept, and then give them the freedom to, in a social virtual environment, actively participate in conversations that explore these concepts according to the experience that each learner brings to the table (their text, artifact, or narrative for sharing). Through those dialogues I expect learners to be enabled to strengthen their connections of experience to concept, to similar situations they might experience in the future, and then bring the now critically empowered and more knowledgeable learning group back together to synthesize their discoveries.

 √       To accomplish this, an instructor must create a path of learning that begins within the learner’s realm of experience, accounts for the diverse environmental factors that each student brings to the table, and proceeds gradually, building on the foundations of prior experiences, as is the most reasonable expectation for progress.

…. Dare I say it?

Perhaps I am being optimistic about the promise this vision shows on paper, but over the past three weeks, I have attempted to sharpen the blurry edges of a vague idea into a plan while being faithful to some of my favorite learning philosophies put forward by Dewey, Jarvis, Garrison, and Vaughan. Among the greatest contribution from the readings was the illumination of possible problems that emerge, and each scholar’s theories on solving the problems not from an immediate, bandaging approach but from the roots. I believe their comprehensive perspectives enabled me to figure out my own specific strategies, adapted to my personal vision and educational setting from the bottom up, and I feel more confident and excited than ever to see my vision enacted into reality.  

C.C.